We Can Just Do Things (In ATProto)

1 month ago 3

"you can just do things".

but also, "we".

i've been bitching about the Discover feed and how it isn't getting much better while the alternatives don't get the same amount of data (no "show more/less" buttons, no "seen" tracking) and thus are at a disadvantage. and then Grace just went ahead and added the "show more/less" buttons to third-party feeds in a pull request.

If you're a custom feed creator, you can now enable "show more" and "show less" buttons in your feeds. This gives people using your feed a simple way to tell you what they love — and what they want less of.

A screenshot of the post menu with "Show more like this" and "Show less like this" highlighted

i've also been bitching about how Discover feed is serving me too much stuff i don't want, and then spacecowboy showed different configurations of the For You feed, and how they can be tested in an interactive debugger. no one is making spacecowboy work on the For You feed, but apparently it is fun enough that they run whole-ass AB experiments as if this one-person show is a social media company.

7 days later and we have some results from the experiment. When we demote popular posts we see: - 8.26% fewer "show less like this" (3340 -> 3064) - 0.24% more posts in For You were liked (242438 -> 243024) - 2.43% more feed loads (438867 -> 449537) Per user and per request metrics:

I started a new For You experiment today that gives less priority to popular posts. 50% of the users on a given day will see popular posts demoted: score = score / power(popularity, 0.2) 50% will see no change (control arm). "popularity" is the number of likes and reposts a post has.

and then i was bitching for a thousandth time that For You isn't getting the "seen" data so i can't use it as a replacement for Discover because it keeps showing the same posts over and over.

and then i remembered that i, too, can do things, so i did it. it took me one hour. i hope it'll make the For You feed usable for me.

i, too, can do things! a week ago, i wrote an article. i wanted to write it a year ago but the momentum wasn't quite there and i was paralyzed by being on the inside. but now that i'm on the outside, i can see people just doing things, and that atmosphere is contagious.

in fact the reason the article blew up is because it showed people just doing things. what, you can just invent a layer of the internet?

in this economy?

today i wanted to spin up an atproto app and i'm not a backend person so i asked and got a lot of replies. then Samuel just made a template for me and anyone who wants to spin up an atproto app.

he didn't have to do it, it's not like his job or anything. i just asked and he spent an hour and did it. the ball is now in my court. i want to add leaflet comments to my blog or something like that. i'll have to learn to deploy backend and shit but why not. i can just do things

you can just do things.

but also, we.

it is the same thing (just do the thing!) but compounding. i'll do this and then you'll riff on it and then i'll riff on that, and so on.

we have a shared space for this now, the atmosphere, and we can be playful and fail and experiment and make unreasonable things. we can make new apps that riff on each other's ideas, we can help the next person get started, we can learn to make backends, we can fix pet bugs or make alternative feeds or open source new platforms